Murphy, Murphy

Photo by Shari Sirotnak

One of my names is Cece. It has many iterations. When scolded, Cecelia. At my worst, Cecelia Rose. In bed, I am named to the rhythm of my pumping fingers, Ce-Ce-Ce-Ce-Ce, I become pulse, I become breath. When I dissociate, I watch my teeth in the mirror make Cece like a snarl, I name myself until the word becomes a vacuum, until I slip in and out of it like a fist through a bangle.

In the years after my sister was abducted, I was only ever Cece Sisterto-Murphy Gowan. Murphy's Sister Gowan. The Girl Whose Sister Disappeared. If you knew our story well, I was The One Who Slept. Sleeping Cece.

Only to Murphy, I was Sissy—for sister, for Cece. My two selves made one. "Sissy come here, Sissy I hate you, Sissy be quiet." I hear her still.

After her, I have been called ready-to-die girl, girl with a death wish as I spat blood into the sink. I've been called heavyhearted, heartless. I've been called Murphy by the women who believed it was my name, after I offered it to them like something that burned me when I touched it. I've been Mother only once, in bed with a woman who wept when she came. Mommy also once, by the nurse this morning as she smeared ultrasound jelly on my abdomen. "Okay, Mommy, let's see what we've got."

Lately, my mother-in-law advises my husband to call me Mama. "Practice," she tells him when it makes me cry and she thinks me overfilled with joy. She pets my hair, tells me I ought to break my new self in like shoes. The baby will not have words for me at first, she says, but Mama will be true still. "You'll feel it," she says, "here"—and she touches my breasts—"and here"—my belly. "Mama," she calls me, follows me through the house like a dog, "Mama," until my husband sends her home.

________

It starts with my sister—everything starts with her, all my stories, all my days. She was fourteen, I was twelve. I hated her the way the moon must hate the sun. I loved her the way you love your teeth, your toes, the unglamorous essential parts of you. I never thought to love her, the way you never think to love the fixed objects of your life.

She will always be fourteen. When I am thirty-five, thirty-seven, fifty. Thirty-one now with a baby who is zero, who will maybe someday be fourteen, who will maybe someday be thirty-one with a baby who is zero or fourteen. If I don't stop myself, my head goes like this, like a toy car spinning on its side, around and around, never forward.

Murphy was taken from her bedroom while I slept in the bed beside her. Murphy was taken third out of ten reported girls that summer in the States, though the takings were not connected. I mean, no one thought they were connected, then or since. The detectives shrugged or raged; the ones with children wept. The news reporters shrugged or wept or suspected all our parents. They said, Sad state of things, meaning this is just what happens, meaning this is just what happens to girls.

Our story is like the others: ground-floor bedroom. Windows open to stir the summer heat around. Years of nothing, no signs, no scent, nothing to follow like a ribbon through the woods.

Our story is unlike the others: me in the bed beside her, me not taken. The bruise on my neck, they thought at first from her abductors, but it was from her, her own twisting fingers.

A thousand times, I've tried to piece our last night back together: I'd fallen asleep to her pinching, whispering, "You rat, you rat" over some minor crime, and then she was lost. Or she drifted off that way, rage at...